It's something that every email marketer really has to
understand because it's the basis for email marketing tools. It's the reason
they exist. Email deliverability means how successful your emails are at
arriving in your subscribers inboxes. Now have you ever tried to send an email
from your gmail or your hot mail or your outlook account to 300 or 3000
contacts?
You probably haven't but if you have you'll see they all bounce back!
They don't arrive. And this is why email service providers also called ESPs
like Send in blue exist.
So we can mass deliver your emails to inboxes how do
mass emails arrive in customers inboxes now it's important to just have a basic
idea of what your email marketing tool does for you and what the journey is
that all your emails are gonna take on their way to your recipient's inboxes.
So
let's look at that so first of all you press send you design your email you hit
send and it goes out instantly to thousands of contacts not so fast first it
has to pass internal filters and every good esp should have internal filters
set up to make sure it's not spam
once the servers of your esp travels the internet and then arrives at the
inbox server now before the email is even allowed onto the server of gmail or
outlook or whatever it is it has to pass ip checks and more spam filters and
these are called gateway filters
This is important because this is where the
receiving server checks to see if your email is coming from a blacklisted ip
address or maybe a white listed ip address next it gets sorted by internal spam
filters into either the spam folder or the inbox so what's important to take
away from this is that there are many checks that your emails have to go
through before they arrive at your recipient's inbox and they might be
classified as spam before they even make it into the spam filter
Now i
mentioned that when it reaches the gateway filter point it has to pass ip
checks let's talk more about that white lists and blacklists one of the ways
that email providers identify spam is by looking at the ip address of the
sender to see what kind of reputation they have if they have a good reputation
their ip address might be on a white list which is a positive list of approved
senders such as the csa the certified senders association
If you're sending
emails from a whitelisted sender then those
emails will have no problems arriving in the inbox now the opposite of a
whitelist is a blacklist which is a negative list of untrustworthy senders such
as spam house now if your ip address or your domain is blacklisted your emails
have no shot getting into the inbox none there are a lot more providers of
blacklists out there than white less so a lot of blacklist providers
such as
spam house maintain these lists of untrustworthy senders and getting on one of
these can be very hard to get yourself removed from so what affects your
reputation well we've already established that deliverability depends on your
online reputation your ip reputation your domain reputation which means your
reputation as a sender on the internet this means that the number of bounces complaints
and unsubscribes that you receive directly impacts your online reputation and
it doesn't just affect you it affects your esp
This is why send in blue has
such a strict anti-spam policy so what can you do to maintain your reputation first
of all you can use what are called email authentication protocols and what
these do is basically say that the ip address of the esp is permitted to send
for your domain they also validate the content and provide some additional
instructions with a reporting mechanism so you can set these up pretty easily
and we have instructions on how to do soon the send and blue help site
The next
thing you can do to maintain you re-reputation is connect your email address to
a live web page so this means you're avoiding no reply email addresses you never
want to send mass emails from those but it also means you're steering clear of
free email address providers like gmail or web or hot mail so your email
reputation your deliverability will be enhanced if you use an email address connected
to a domain that you own and you also have to choose if you're going to send
with shared or dedicated ip addresses if you don't send very often then you
want to use the shared ip addresses
because you're benefiting from the good
deliverability of other senders but if you send a lot then you can control your
ip reputation much better by using a dedicated ip address and this is something
that your esp will be able to walk you through and explain to you based on your
situation whether shared or dedicated ip addresses are best for you finally and
we will talk about this a bit more as well you want to practice good list
hygiene
So this means you don't want to act like a spammer so you want to make
your subscribers complete a double opt-in we'll talk a lot about that coming up
you want to remove bounces and inactive subscribers you might want to run
re-engagement campaigns when people stop reading your emails and you have to never
ever buy email of addresses buy email addresses that is a one-way ticket to no
deliverability in a blacklist so follow these steps and you should not have any
deliverability problems we hope we've given you a good understanding of why
email deliverability is at the heart of email marketing.
